Folding Press

Located in the Format Furniture showroom in the Flinders Quarter, Folding Press was developed in response to a brief from the publication stablemates of Saturday in Design; Design Quarterly and Indesign magazines.

Two weeks prior to the event, the challenge was set to DesignOffice to design a presence for the publications using only back issues of the respective magazines. In response to this brief, the studio devised the 13.5m long wall to sit as a tactile backdrop to Format’s furniture collection. The pages of the publications were cut into 205mm squares and sorted by colour before each being folded six times into the resultant ‘kite’ base. This form, a standard base module for many complex origami creations, was chosen due to its asymmetric geometry and three-dimensional quality.

Folding Press was made up of over 2,500 individual pieces of paper. Once cut and sorted by colour, the paper was folded and the installation assembled over a 48-hour period to form a delicate, textural and tonally gradated wall.